


Two words combined that can't make sense.

by werepope (quiteparadise)



Series: 2014 Advent Calendar for a Filthy-Minded Athiest [13]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Death, Government sanctioned killing, M/M, Special Agents AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-13
Updated: 2014-12-13
Packaged: 2018-03-01 07:59:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2765627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quiteparadise/pseuds/werepope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zayn puts bullets in people for a living.  You think he'd be more prepared for this kind of thing.</p><p>(Spoiler explanation of death tag in notes.)</p><p> </p><p>Advent calendar challenge: Drunks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two words combined that can't make sense.

It's Harry, of all people, who comes to collect him. Harry whose version of field service is keeping his firearm certification and a .22 caliber in his desk. Fucking _Harry_.

They were going to send someone for him eventually, and the jumped-up, masochistic, terrified part of him thinks _they'd send Harry to break the news gently_. But they wouldn't. Not here. Not unless there's someone with a tranquilizer gun aimed at him. And there isn't. He'd know. He's got a good sense of having a target on his back.

He might not be here to break bad news, but they'd send Harry to bring him in gently. Bring him somewhere contained. Somewhere with no civilians. Somewhere with no witnesses who aren't on payroll, aren't trained for sudden outbreaks of violence.

For a minute Harry just sits quietly beside him, watching Zayn's reflection in the mirror behind the bottles while Zayn drinks, his palm leaving a fogged up patch of nervous sweat on the glass.

"Are you ready?" Harry asks finally, and Zayn reels back from him so fast he nearly topples his stool. But the low grade black hole that's been forming in his chest kicks open a fraction and it hurts like hell. He wasn't prepared for— He didn't think it would actually, that Liam would actually— He wasn't fucking _prepared_ for this.

Harry grabs his shoulder hard, to keep him upright, keep him present. Keep him from bolting or puking or passing out.

"He's okay," Harry says. "He's unchanged," he corrects. His voice gets lower and lower, as his conviction falls out from underneath him. "He was when I left.  It's going to be okay, Zayn. He wouldn't let this keep him down."

But Zayn's too realistic or too cynical or too _Zayn_ to believe that. He knows how this ends. Liam didn't come down with the flu or get diagnosed with cancer. He took a bullet to the chest. You don't get through that with determination. It takes surgery and debridement and physical therapy and even then there could still be so much nerve damage left he couldn't breathe without a machine ever again.

It must show on Zayn's face, his realism, because Harry squeezes at him tighter and then lets his hand fall. "What do you need?" he asks.

"Another," Zayn says, lifting his head only enough to get the eye of the bartender and drain the last swill from the bottom of his glass. It's burns full all the way down his throat and blossoms a stinging heat that spreads through his stomach. It's a pleasant sensation, when you've had enough. Zayn is nowhere near having had enough.

Harry sighs. He doesn't bother being quiet about it. Zayn appreciates that about Harry on most days. That he's straight-forward. That nine times out of ten he just doesn't give a shit. It's one of the great mysteries and frustrations of Zayn's daily life that they can work where they work, do what they do, and people still feel the need to pussyfoot around each other. Maybe this level of subterfuge gets in your brain, infects you somehow, changes you. Like a bacterial infection. Like a lesion.

"I think you should quit," Harry says.

"You think I cant handle this?"

"I think you went off site to get pissed. I think you wouldn't have done that a year ago. And if that's you being unable to deal with the consequences of field work—"

Zayn snorts dismissive and derisive and mean, because what the hell does Harry know about field work that doesn't come second hand through a comm link or a debriefing report.

"Then you need to quit," Harry says, plowing through, ignoring Zayn like most people don't. "And if it's the particulars of this one, if its Liam, then you need to quit. Or at least reconsider your position."

"You know," Zayn says, rolling the edge of his glass around on the table to prevent him from throwing it, preferably at Harry's head. "For as much as you talk, Haz, you're really excellent at saying absolutely fucking nothing."

"Alright. What would you like me to say, then?"

Zayn drops his head to push a hand over his hair. It had been tidily slicked back this afternoon for his six month physical evaluation, but it feels rough under his palm now, like he's been pulling at it, worrying it.

"Just go. I don't want to… listen to anything right now."

Harry's too smart to argue with him. He just lays Zayn's phone down on the bar by his elbow and gets up. Zayn shoves it, means to slide it down the bar, keep it the fuck away from himself, but it only ends up spinning a bit. Zayn tangles his hand into his hair to hide the way it shakes.

"No. Fuck. I don't want that thing," he says, and he knows Harry is way too smart to point out that Zayn's voice is shaking as well, that his shoulders shudder in time with the rattle of his voice. That something vital in his core has come loose and it's trembling him apart.

Harry sits back down. "Whiskey please."

It takes a long moment for Zayn to get himself back under control. To calm his breathing. Everything else falls more or less in line after that. He still sounds a bit wrecked when he speaks, but he'll blame the alcohol for that.

"Is this really what we do, Hazza?"

"Drink in the middle of the afternoon? I don't know. I was hoping it wouldn't become a trend."

"Cope," Zayn says.

"Not sure this counts as coping, technically speaking."

Zayn was military for four years before the right person got ahold of his record and tipped his name into the hat for possible recruitment. He was a field agent for another two before someone put together his numbers at the range with his uncanny eyesight and vetted him for training. He's been a black ops specialist for three years. It's late in the game to be asking questions about survival.

He does it anyway: "What do you do?"

Harry hums noncommittally. "I rather like art galleries."

"What?"

"You encounter a lot of other people's misery in art galleries. It's grounding." He lifts his drink in salute to the barman before taking a sip. "Sometimes it's good for a laugh, too."

Zayn feels like a slow collapse. He can't imagine wanting to see anyone else's done up in paint or clay or carefully teased bits of dryer lint, whatever the hell passes for art in the kind of places that Harry goes to.

"If he dies," Zayn says, and Harry gives a curt nod before he can say anything else. Plausible deniability.

"I know."

This is the closest Harry's ever been to serving his country. He's the furthest from military that their operation can tolerate, and even he's a step too far at least once a month. But he's got the kind of brain activity that makes chess champions seem like vegetables, so they let him slide. No one puts the pieces together quite as quickly or accurately as Harry Styles. The rest of the intelligence department trails along in his wake just filling in his leaps and bounds for the plebeians.

Maybe it's no surprise that Harry's so much better at this kind of thing than Zayn seems to be. Maybe no one but Zayn will bat an eye that he broke first. Or maybe Harry was just better at hiding his break. Zayn remembers him coming back to work after two weeks with new tattoos peeking out from under his cuffs and in the flash of his open collar. Whatever he'd thought of it at the time, he'd kept to himself. He can't remember now.

Zayn presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and thinks _this is it_. Whatever happens today, it's the end of something.

Zayn finishes his drink and Harry gets him a water, which he takes because he knows he has to get through it before he'll get anything stronger.

"I didn't think it would hurt like this," he admits, because the whiskey is settling high up in his brain and dumbing him down into the lower part, letting things through that he'd much rather have swallowed.

Harry snorts this time. "You did a stint in Afghanistan."

"I was prepared for that."

"Bullshit."

Zayn shrugs. "I got used to it."

Harry mulls over it for a while, contemplating his own glass more than Zayn's maudlin history of emotional self-destruction. "You couldn't get used to this?"

"I guess not."

It occurs to him not for the first time how fucked up he must be as a person. He liked the little swoop of adrenaline he'd get from Liam's secret smile when they were in a briefing together, the pull of his heart snagging on his veins and sending a little shiver of ache up his left arm when either of them got in too deep, had too close of a call. He didn't want that to dull. He liked Liam as fresh as a bruise, something to press on satisfyingly in the dark when he needed a thrill.

He hadn't thought it went as deep as this, but now there's that scientific discovery in his chest, a bit of dark matter or a minuscule black hole that's imploding slowly but surely and taking him out with it. It'll be a marvel up until it takes the rest of the earth out after him. It'd be fitting though, he thinks, for the world to pay that kind of cost for handling Liam so carelessly.

Harry's phone beeps in his pocket, and Zayn doesn't need to know what it says to know it's to do with Liam, to do with him. All he needs for confirmation is that Harry pulls it out to look. He wouldn't do that for anything less.

Zayn closes his eyes tight, hitches his shoulders up around his ears. He closes himself off as well as he can, and the wash of white noise in his head goes deafening loud to help out.

In Afghanistan he'd been wiped clean by a mile of sand reflecting the sun blinding in his scope and the burning cold of the Kush under his belly while he exhaled slow and pulled the trigger.

In black ops training they'd taught him to take a shot without someone at his side correcting him in degrees, and he'd never known until then how much he liked having someone else to share the responsibility of a bullet the length of his hand and a body so far away it might as well not exist at all.

As a special agent he minimizes threats before they're big enough to put a blip on anyone else's radar. He flies half way around the world to Peru, to Bolivia, to Singapore and he learns his targets through the double glaze windows of their houses or their offices or their convoy of kitted out Hummers. He doesn't ask questions and he never gets close enough to take risks.

They're a mile from headquarters, and no one along the line warned him he could be taken out at that kind of distance, too.

...

Liam's fingers twitch under Zayn's cheek and he wakes up quick and smooth, a well conditioned soldier. Liam's brown eyes are bleary with painkillers and he has dark circles under them from almost three days of sedation, but he's looking down at Zayn and smiling just a bit.

"Was I drooling?" Zayn asks, sitting up.

Liam shakes his head a fraction. His breathing is careful and shallow. He swallows and Zayn can see the twitch of pain that he conceals, can see how much that hurts, too.

Zayn lays his hand over Liam's on the blanket.

"Congratulations, Agent Payne," he says. "You're officially back from the dead."

Liam smiles a bit wider and Zayn levers himself up, through the ache in his back and the clench of something tight and dangerous in his chest, to press a kiss to his cheek.

"Don't make a fucking habit of it."

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not a sadist. I'm not even good at angst. There is no character death.


End file.
